Fear, uncertainty grip Mohan Karki following his deportation by ICE

Speaking late Wednesday evening from the airport in Delhi, India, where he was about to board a flight to Bhutan – a country in which he’s never lived and where he has no friends or family – Mohan Karki said through an interpreter that the reality of his situation was beginning to settle in and that he was afraid. “I’m really scared,” he said. “My body is shaking right now.”

On Tuesday, authorities at St. Clair County Jail in Michigan informed Karki that he was being immediately deported from the United States, leaving him with barely enough time to call his wife, Tika Basnet, before officers with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement accompanied him on a commercial flight bound for Newark, New Jersey. From there, he flew solo to Delhi, where he had an extended layover before his final flight to the tiny Himalayan country of Bhutan. “We haven’t prepared any plans, and we have no idea what’s going to happen when I land there,” said Karki, who boarded the airplane with little more than his cell phone and a bag of clothes. “I have no family in Bhutan, no one nearby.”

Born in a refugee camp in Nepal, Karki, 30, emigrated to the United States 14 years ago, eventually settling in Columbus, where in 2021 he met Basnet. Later married, the two lived together in Blacklick until Karki was taken in by authorities during a routine ICE check in last April, his order of removal based on a teenage burglary charge to which he pleaded guilty shortly after he arrived legally in the United States – a point in time when he didn’t yet understand the rules and culture in the country to which he had recently immigrated, Basnet said in July. Karki would spend the next nine months in detention, missing the June birth of his daughter, who he said he has never met or held. 

“When I looked at my wife’s face the day that they handcuffed me, it felt like everything went dark,” said Karki, who sustained himself during the months in detention by talking daily to his wife and family on the phone, in addition to receiving calls and visits from his attorneys, Brian Hoffman and Diana Marin, whose legal efforts to fight his deportation provided a degree of hope.

Karki’s case was complicated by his standing as a stateless person, having been denied legal status by Nepal upon his birth. (Karki is one of more than 100,000 Bhutanese Nepalis whose families fled ethnic cleansing in Bhutan, the majority of whom eventually settled legally in the United States.) 

“And immigration courts are not really set up to deal with the issue of statelessness,” Hoffman said in late November. “The very first sentence denying our motion and dismissing our appeal said, ‘The respondent, a citizen and native of Nepal,’ which is not true. And over and over again that has been an issue in the litigation.”

Having now been deported, Karki’s legal status presents more immediate challenges, since as a stateless person he has never been granted a birth certificate or a passport, which will severely restrict his ability to work or travel in Bhutan or any neighboring countries. “So, everything that has been documented about what happens to Bhutanese Nepali refugees when they are deported, that’s exactly what awaits him,” Marin said in a late November interview while discussing Karki’s potential deportation. (A GoFundMe to support Basnet as she works toward reunification with Karki can be found here.)

Prior to moving to the United States, Karki had a belief that the country would provide a better life and more opportunity than the refugee camp in which he grew up. “We had this expectation of having a good life and being able to provide,” said Karki, who allowed that his impression of America had shifted amid the expansion of regressive immigration policies that have now ripped him from his wife and daughter and expelled him to a country that is completely foreign to him. “It feels different, yeah. It just feels different.”